Coursera cofounder Andrew Ng launches online deep learning courses

Andrew Ng is returning to the world of online education with a bang. He’ll be teaching a set of courses on deep learning through Coursera, the online education site that he cofounded, with the aim of helping people get up to speed on key developments in artificial intelligence.

Ng’s courses will cover a number of topics essential to understanding the machine learning techniques powering systems today. These are designed for students with some basic machine learning knowledge and are meant to help people gain enough proficiency with deep neural networks to put it on a résumé.

Three of the courses are available today, and Coursera’s deep learning specialization will include a total of five courses when all is said and done.

Ng’s goal in launching the new courses is to help distribute deep learning knowledge to more people so they’ll be able to implement advanced machine learning and create an AI-powered future.

Ng has been outspoken about the lack of talent needed to implement deep learning around the world. These courses will give students an opportunity to learn about important topics from someone who was a former chief scientist at Baidu and previously worked on the Google Brain project.

The courses build on Ng’s expertise teaching AI over the internet. His first course on machine learning, which was also the first class offered through Coursera, has been taken by more than 2 million students since 2011. It’s widely seen as a key primer for people who want to get started in the field.

The courses also tie into deeplearning.ai, Ng’s latest project. He cryptically announced the project earlier this summer and said in a blog post that it’s focused on helping advance AI knowledge. The new courses aren’t the last step for deeplearning.ai, either; Ng said that he’s working on two other AI projects that will take shape in the future.